Logos and Truth
Dec 6th, 2007 by Amanda
There’s a section in Chapter Three of Velvet Elvis that reminded me of something that I desperately need to remember. This section is called “Logos” and, in it, I see myself. I see the me who struggled this summer to find the truth and have a faith large enough to hold it. I see countless people in this section who have turned away from God because they couldn’t fit both God and newfound knowledge in the same box.
This section comes right after he talks about affirming the truth wherever you find it. It’s a great section. I hope you’re as inspired by these words as I was.
Do you know anybody who grew up in a religious environment, maybe even a Christian one, and walked away from faith/church/God when they turned eighteen and went away to college?
Whenever I ask this question in a group of people, almost every hand goes up. Let me suggest why. Imagine what happens when a young woman is raised in a Christian setting but hasn’t been taught that all things are hers and then goes to a university where she’s exposed to all sorts of new ideas and views and perspectives. She takes classes in psychology and anthropology and biology and world history, and her professors are people who have devoted themselves to their particular fields of study. Is it possible that in the course of lecturing on their field of interest, her professors will from time to time say things that are true? Of course. Truth is available to everyone.
But let’s say her professors aren’t Christians, it is not a “Christian” university, and this young woman hasn’t been taught that all things are hers. What if she has been taught that Christianity is the only thing that’s true? What if she has been taught that there is no truth outside the Bible? She’s now faced with this dilemma: believe the truth she’s learning or the Christian faith she was brought up with.
Or we could put her dilemma this way: intellectual honesty or Jesus?
How many times have you seen this? I can’t tell you the number of people in their late teens or early twenties I know, or those I have been told about, who experience truth outside the boundaries of their religion and abandon the whole thing because they think it’s a choice (which is a fatal flaw in thinking we’ll address in a moment). They are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways, and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart, and the faith they were handed doesn’t have room for what they are learning.
But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.
It’s not truth over here and Jesus over there, as if they were two different things. Where we find one, we find the other. Jesus is quoted in the book of John saying, “I and the Father are one.” If Jesus and God are one, if Jesus shows us what God is really, truly like, and God is truth and all truth is God’s truth, then Jesus takes us into the truth, not away from it. He frees us to embrace whatever is true and good and beautiful wherever we find it.
To live this way then, we have to believe in a big Jesus. For many, Jesus was presented to them as the solution to a problem. In fact, this has been the dominant way of explaining the story of the Bible in Western culture for the past several hundred years. It’s not that it is wrong; it’s just that Jesus is so much more. The presentation often begins with sin and the condition of human beings, separated from God and without hope in the world. God then came up with a way to fix the problem by sending Jesus, who came to the world to give us a way out of the mess we find ourselves in. So if we were to draw a continuum of the story of the Bible, Jesus essentially shows up late in the game.
But the first Christians didn’t see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.
In the first line of his gospel, John calls Jesus the “Word”. The word Word here in Greek is the word logos, which is where we get the English word logic.
Logic, intelligence, design. The blueprint of creation.
When we speak of these concepts, what we are describing is the way the world is arranged. There is some sort of order under the chaos, and some people seem to have a better handle on it than others. Some understand math, some the human psyche, and others can speak clearly and compellingly about the solar system. When we say someone is intelligent, we are saying they have insight to how things are put together.
And the Bible keeps insisting that Jesus is how God put things together. The writer Paul said that Jesus is how God holds all things together. The Bible points us to a Jesus who is in some mysterious way behind it all.
Jesus is the arrangement. Jesus is the design. Jesus is the intelligence. For a Christian, Jesus’ teachings aren’t to be followed because they are a nice way to live a moral life. They are to be followed because they are the best possible insight into how the world really works. They teach us how things are.
I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest levels of existence. For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God. I love the way Paul puts it in the book of Colossians: These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. “The reality…is found in Christ.”
I love this section. I come from a faith tradition that limits faith. It didn’t have room for truth outside of what is found in the Bible, even though we all know there is truth outside of the Bible. Thank you, Rob Bell, for reminding me of that.
I hope more people come to the same conclusion as this guy. The problem I suspect he’s hitting is that the people who do come to this conclusion are less likely to go back to living in the small-town fundamentalist communities where the problem originates. Thus, the insight never gets conveyed to the people with the power to improve matters.
I suspect there’s one other factor he’s missing: a lot of people are religious primarily because everyone else is. Going to college causes them to deconvert because there’s no longer a social consensus for them to follow. A person like this would probably experience the same sort of deconversion process as someone who fell away due to an intellectual expansion, but the underlying motivation would be very different. So it’s quite easy to accidentally lump both effects together.
People who are religious only because they’re sheep are religious, but not Christian. And I would say he’s not talking about those folks. He’s specifically talking about the group of people who are taught that the Bible is the be all end all to everything, and as a result, when some new truth comes along, they can’t handle it. He’s specifically talking about people of faith who keep that faith in a box and rather than expanding the box or getting rid of it altogether, it just crumbles, taking their faith with it.
Very good. I am amazed how many Christians in the States cannot face up to the facts about evolution because they fear it will destroy their faith. If they hadn’t been taught that the two were mutually exclusive in the first place they wouldn’t have to make such a terrible choice between God and intellectual honesty.
Good post. I might have to buy this book. Maybe Rob Bell should pay you for your great advertising!
Yeah, I know. I was more referring more to the way everyone raises their hand at his question. Some of their friends probably did deconvert due to changing concepts of truth, but I’d wager hard money that at least a few deconverted due to changing social environment, and it just looked to the audience members like horizon expansion syndrome.
It’s a fundamental rule of anthropology that, when studying a culture, you can’t just ask members of that culture why they behave in certain fashions. What they perceive as the reason quite often bears no relationship to the actual root cause. I find this concept really interesting.